proGRAMINg thoughts 👋

Percona Community is a great place to share you database knowledge and expirience. In this summer I was lucky to participate in Percona Community Live 2022 and publish my two modest articles on Percona Community Blog.

I have spent a lot of time working with various database systems. I was a SQL and PL/SQL developer on big distributed teams, writing tons of nontrivial SQL queries and implementing tons of complex and tricky business logic on the database side. And I worked as a “classical” Java developer where we interacted with any databases through ORM, operating mostly JPA annotation and framework properties (hoping to find and turn on a “magic” parameter fast=true). ...

It’s hard to find at least two people who would format the same SQL query in the same way. Everyone has their own style and their own arguments. And everyone is absolutely sure that this is the only right way. That was to be expected, because of the declarative nature of SQL. In imperative program languages, we define and control the order of statements execution, and it affects how we format our code. But in SQL query we don’t know at all the order of execution in advance and it deprives us of an important reference point. As a result, we have a lot of formatting options. ...

For many people, SQL is still a “low-level” computer language for data. It is considered an ancient and difficult to understand language, designed for special secret engineers with special secret skills. In this way, a mere mortal should not write SQL queries and should rely on special tools. And we are used to the fact that almost all ORM, DB managers, monitoring tools, and other DB tools generate tons of “tricky” queries against our data, turning SQL into dumb bytecode. And we can basically just observe this process and hope for the best. ...

Michael Stonebraker is a live legend, godfather of databases, relational patriarch, Miles Davis in the database World. He stood at the database roots in the 70s and to this day he stays on the bleeding edge of data technologies. Today we will review his keynote “The cloud in your feature” from an online conference Postgres Build 2021. All goes to the clouds When you try to hide hardware, wires and pipes under the floor in your office in central London or Frankfurt, cloud guys from Microsoft Azure box up data centers in standard 40 foot shipping containers and drop them around the World in places with cheap power. Guess who will win? On-Premise data centers are very expensive, but cloud solutions become cheaper and cheaper everyday. You have no chance to win these guys. ...

SQL is Esperanto in the data world. But unlike “Lingwe Uniwersala” SQL became world-known and really common. Initially SQL was invented in 70 special for databases. Even then its creators aimed to create a simple and powerful data language for a wide range of users, with not only IT background, such as engineers, scientists, researchers, analytics, managers etc. SQL first of all was made by humans for humans, not for machines. ...